


Typical Tuesday Night

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [21]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, a little background Danny/Colleen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 11:52:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19745203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: In which Danny almost gets himself sacrificed by druids. For my h/c bingo "blood loss" square.





	Typical Tuesday Night

**Author's Note:**

> This story may be potentially triggery for self harm and suicide, due to the nature of Danny's wounds, though they aren't self-inflicted. It's fairly bloody compared to what I normally write, though no worse than things that have actually happened to him in canon.

"Only you, Danny," Ward snapped as he struggled with the bonds tying Danny's wrists to the altar. They didn't want to come off, the knots slick with blood, his own hands shaking and slipping off. "Only you could almost get sacrificed by _druids,_ what the actual _fuck."_

"I didn't know they were druids when we met them in the pub," Danny said meekly.

"How on Earth does that make it better?!" He finally got Danny's hands free and put an arm around Danny's bare back, helping him sit up. Danny was shivering violently.

"Take a road trip with me, he said. It'll be fun, he said," Ward muttered. He took off his jacket to put it around Danny's shoulders, then stripped off his shirt, the only thing he had to try to bind the gashes on Danny's arms. "The next place we need to go is Scotland, Ward. It'll be fun, Ward. You even speak the language there -- which was a total freaking _lie,_ by the way, if any of these people are speaking English you couldn't prove it by me, I can only understand one word in five ..."

There was blood everywhere, soaking Danny's jeans, splashed over his bare torso as if he'd been dipped in it. How much blood could a person lose? He should probably be lying down, Ward thought, feeling Danny shivering against him as Ward tried clumsily to bind the crude gashes that had opened Danny's veins. But they didn't have time for it; they had to get out of here before the hooded and robed cultists he'd chased off at gunpoint came back.

"Can you walk?" he asked, helping Danny slide off the altar.

"Sure," Danny said agreeably, and then his knees tried to buckle. "Maybe not. I ... uh ... don't feel so good."

"Yeah, you were drugged and kidnapped by druids. By druids!" he muttered, and got an arm around Danny's rib cage.

"I think they're more like a cult," Danny muttered, clinging to Ward. "Druids are ... it's just a religion, they're not dangerous, this was something else, sort of like the Scottish version of the Hand, maybe --"

"Danny?"

"What?"

"Please stop talking."

*

By the time they made it down the hill to the little country road where Ward had parked the car, Danny seemed to be getting more of the drug out of his system, but he was still weak and uncoordinated. Ward dumped him in the backseat in a sticky, blood-covered heap.

"Hospital?" Ward asked.

"I ... I think I'll be okay if we go back to the hotel," Danny said. "I just want to get cleaned up and sleep."

"Those cuts need stitches."

"I'd rather go to the hotel," Danny said, giving every indication that he was starting to dig in and turn stubborn. Arguing with Danny, Ward had learned, was like arguing with a rock. Danny didn't (usually) get angry or yell; he was just completely impossible to budge once he'd made up his mind.

"Fine," Ward snapped, "but if you bleed to death back there, I'm going to put _I told you so_ on your tombstone."

The hotel presented another problem, which was getting in without drawing attention to the fact that they were both covered in blood, dirt, and twigs. Ward decided to hope that they looked like they were stumbling in drunk, and tried to mentally rehearse a cover story involving a bar fight, but the desk clerk didn't ask. Maybe this sort of thing was perfectly normal around here.

Their room was a small double. Ward deposited Danny in the bathroom, wrapped a towel around his arms and told him to hold it, then dug through their packs for their minimal first-aid supplies. Nothing they had was going to help with this. He heaved a sigh, retrieved his blood-covered jacket from Danny, and went down to ask the front desk if Housekeeping had a first-aid kit he could borrow. This time he did get the sort of worried look that often comes right before calling the police.

"My brother got cut up pretty bad in a bar fight," Ward said, lounging on the desk and trying to look casual and not at all suspicious. "You got some first-aid stuff, or something? It'd be a big help. It's late and everything's closed."

He wasn't sure if it was the fat tip he quietly shoved across the counter or just the sheer desire to get him out of the lobby, but soon he was on his way back upstairs with a first-aid kit. He found Danny awkwardly trying to wash off the blood without reopening the sluggishly bleeding cuts on his arms. There was blood all over the sink and every washcloth and towel in sight.

"For God's sake," Ward muttered. He made Danny sit on the edge of the tub and soaked a hand towel under warm water. If the bleeding hadn't mostly stopped, he would have dragged Danny to the ER whether he wanted to go or not, but it looked like the cuts were clotting on their own. Danny was as pale as the porcelain fixtures, though.

Ward cleaned him up as best he could. He wasn't about to try stitching Danny up, so he bound Danny's arms in all the gauze in the first-aid kit. Danny obediently moved each finger in turn and loosely made fists until Ward was convinced that he hadn't had any tendons severed, which just about exhausted his knowledge of first aid.

"I kinda miss Bethany with the staple-gun thingie," Danny said, with a pallid ghost of his normal grin. "Claire stitched me up with a regular stapler one time, did I ever tell you that?"

"How many times have you -- okay, no, forget I asked. You're gonna have scars, you know." He wrapped more tape around the bandages and grimaced at the results. "Sure you don't want to have a professional do this?"

"I'm sure. I don't really want to be around people right now." There was something painful about that, the quiet way he said it, that Ward didn't know how to deal with -- so he dealt with it the way he dealt with everything that was hard to think about: deflection.

"I'm not people, huh?" Ward asked, wringing out the hand towel in the sink. Pink water swirled down the drain. "Tilt your head back; it's all in your hair and everything."

"You know what I mean," Danny said, obediently tilting his head and letting Ward clean him up. "Anyway ... scars ... I've got those already. Thank you, Ward. For the save. And ... everything."

Ward had to look away from the naked sincerity in his eyes. He focused on dabbing at Danny's bloody face and chest with the wet towel. "You're still not forgiven for being almost sacrificed on an altar by a guy wearing a deer skull. This is ridiculous even by our low standards."

Danny laughed a little. Ward dropped the sticky hand towel on the pile of bloody towels on the floor.

"Housekeeping is going to hate us," Danny said. He was starting to shiver again.

"I gave everybody a boatload of tips. They have nothing to complain about." He glanced around the bathroom, which looked like a murder had been committed there. The bloody handprints on the sink were an especially gruesome touch. Okay, maybe they did have a few things to complain about. Ward scrambled up and washed his hands so at least _he_ could stop leaving bloody handprints on things, then gave Danny a hand up. Danny was still terribly wobbly. Ward filled a water glass and shoved it into his hands along with a couple of ibuprofen. "Take this. I'm gonna get you some orange juice or something from a vending machine. They give you orange juice when you give blood, right? And this is kind of like that."

"This is nothing like that," Danny complained, but he let Ward lead him, weaving, out of the bathroom. Ward sat him on the nearest bed, and crouched to dig a clean pair of pants out of Danny's pack. He looked up to see that Danny had put the water glass aside and was trying to do something with his phone.

"Now what?"

"I want to call Colleen. She'll worry if I don't."

"She'll worry more if you do." 

"Stupid touch-screen," Danny complained, not deigning to answer.

"Trade you." Ward shoved a pair of pants into his lap and took the phone. He had to wipe it on his jeans; Danny was still getting blood on things. "What's your unlock pattern?"

"A dragon." Danny sketched it in the air.

"That looks nothing like a dragon."

"I only have nine dots to work with. Cut me some slack here."

Ward tapped Colleen's preset, handed the phone back, and went to find a vending machine to save himself from having to listen to Danny try to explain this delightful evening to Colleen back in New York.

He had forgotten that he was still wearing his filthy jeans and wearing nothing on top except a badly blood-stained T-shirt until an elderly lady came along while he was dithering over vending machine choices. She gave him a long look.

"I'm fine," Ward said.

Apparently either she believed him, or the American accent convinced her that it was better not to ask questions of a blood-covered foreigner at the vending machines at 2 a.m., because she wandered off. Ward got a couple bottles of orange juice and a package of cookies, and went back to the room to find Danny in bed, curled up and making quietly reassuring noises at Colleen. "Oh hey, okay, Ward's back," he said to her, and held out the phone. "She wants to talk to you."

Ward warily took it. "Yeah, hey?"

"Ward," Colleen said. "How is he, really?"

"He's okay. I'll drag him to whatever the Scottish version of Urgent Care is in the morning." Danny shook his head "no"; Ward ignored him.

_"Druids?"_

"I know, another incredibly unlikely brush with death, must be a day ending in 'Y'. Only Danny, right?"

She huffed a small laugh. "So you guys are in Scotland now."

"We get around."

"Yeah, well." She took a breath. "Thanks for looking out for him, Ward."

"It's a full-time job, you know."

"Tell me about it."

"Hey," Danny said, from the bed. "I don't think the way this seems to be going."

"You wanna say good night to the idiot?"

"Sure," she said with a laugh. "Night, Ward."

"Night," he said, and gave the phone back to Danny. It occurred to him, as he went to crack open a bottle of orange juice to give himself something to do with his hands, that this might have been the friendliest interaction he'd ever had with Colleen, which was kind of a sad commentary on his life.

Danny hung up after the obligatory lovey-dovey signoff and sat up to meekly accept the bottle of orange juice Ward gave him. "Let me see your arms," Ward said, and Danny turned his arms over. The bandages were slightly blood-spotted, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped completely by now.

"We're definitely going to Urgent Care in the morning, or whatever they have here," Ward declared. "At least they can make sure you don't have any compromised arteries and aren't going to rupture and bleed out the next time you punch somebody."

"I'm not going to," Danny said quietly. "I have a pretty good feeling for how my body works. We learned that _really_ well in K'un Lun. And I don't think this is dangerous. It's just unpleasant."

"Speaking as the person who gets to arrange your funeral if you're wrong, I insist. Also, what the druids did to you is nothing compared to what Colleen's going to do to me if I don't."

"Colleen's not going to stab you," Danny said. He lay down again, curled up in the bed with the bottle of orange juice held in both bandaged hands. He looked terribly young like that.

"I'm glad you have that much faith in Colleen's forbearance, but I don't." His hands were sticky. He looked down and found that in spite of his attempts to wash it off, there was blood in every crease of his fingers and palms, not to mention all over his T-shirt. Danny's blood. He tried to suppress a shudder. "You know what? I'm going to take a shower."

"Yeah, okay," Danny said sleepily.

"Eat a cookie, they're medicinal. And don't open the door for any druids."

"I'm starting to get the impression," Danny said to the ceiling, "that I'm not going to live this down anytime soon."


End file.
